There might be signs that the United States is heading for a recession. But other economists are arguing just as fiercely to pay attention to signs that the United States won’t see a recession any time soon.

No matter how convincingly a person or institution argues for or against a coming recession, they just don't know. Not until after it starts, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) — the accepted arbiter of U.S. recessions — pinpoints the month, can businesspeople know for sure that a recession is happening. But that said, surveys of economists show consistently rising expectations for a recession by mid-to-late 2023, primarily due to the Fed's battle against inflation. To avoid a recession, the Fed must raise rates high enough to tame inflation, but not so high or for so long as

It's hard to predict exactly when the economy will enter the next recession. But many economists now think one could start in fall 2023, and for a number of reasons. First, inflation is now at its highest level in a quarter century. The Fed is signaling a fast pace of interest-rate rises over the course of 2022 and 2023 to get inflation under control, and it's also planning to sell off some of the assets it has purchased under its quantitative easing programs. Many analysts think that such sharp tightening could push the economy into a recession, as it has done every time before since World Wa